In the 2007 Callaway Junior World Golf Championships, South African Dylan Frittelli won the Boys 15-17 Division with an impressive performance on the demanding South Course at Torrey Pines. He shot 70-70-69-74 to blow away the field and win by five shots over the next-best golfer, Danny Lee.

Ryo Ishikawa, a 15-year-old from Japan, was in the field that week, but hardly was a factor, other than creating a media frenzy.

The so-called “Bashful Prince” had won a Japan Tour event two months earlier, but against some of the world's best juniors he was overmatched at Torrey Pines. Ishikawa couldn't score par in any of his four rounds, twice carded 76 and finished alone in 23rd, 16 shots behind Frittelli.

Maybe he just had a bad week. Sixteen shots over four rounds, though, is a whipping.

So guess who's making his PGA Tour debut this week on one of America's greatest golf courses, Riviera Country Club.

Look who's playing two more events on sponsors' exemptions when the tour swings to Florida next month.

Consider who is playing – this is painful even to type – in the Masters in April.

Imagine who the No. 67-ranked player in the world is.

Not Frittelli, who is doing so well as a freshman at Texas that he was named the Big 12 Conference's Golfer of the Month for November.

It would be Ishikawa, now a 17-year-old professional whose success on the minor-league Japan Tour, followed by his ridiculous rise in the badly flawed World Golf Rankings, has put him in position to garner invitations from even the leaders at Augusta National Golf Club.

What a joke.

When will golf learn? How many more Ty Tryons and Michelle Wies and Tadd Fujikawas do we have to endure before people get a grip on the fact this game is monumentally difficult at the professional level, and that it takes more than stringing a few good rounds together to make a career of it.

When will sponsors and endorsers and tournament directors cease at abetting these misguided kids and their greedy parents from going down such a twisted path?

And when will everybody agree that 99 percent of the teen-agers who try to play for cash have the same odds of excelling as a kindergartener in calculus class?

Ishikawa will be introduced to the American golf media today in a news conference at Riviera, where he will tee it up Thursday in the Northern Trust Open, whose championship is being defended by Phil Mickelson.

Even by L.A. standards, it will be a reportorial zoo, not because of the regional outlets that always cover the tournament, but because the Japanese media is frothing over Ishikawa, who drew more than 40 reporters and photographers for his Junior World appearance.

Around 400 media members will be on hand this week, and, according to tournament PR man Toby Zwikel, the media center has been expanded by 33 percent to accommodate the crush.

This, for a kid who has a better chance of meeting Julia Roberts on Hollywood Boulevard then he does of winning the NTO.